Are You Engaging Mobile Users and Winning Their Business?

One billion people use Facebook. The number of Twitter IDs has now passed one billion as well. Yelp has over 100 million users, and over 100 million users socially interact with YouTube every week. Whichever way you choose to look at it, social media is the new landscape to connect with consumers and generate new business opportunities.

However, along with the changing face of marketing opportunities these online entities and social media sites generate, there comes a shift in the architecture through which this lucrative audience can, and ultimately must, be connected with.

The rapid rise of the smartphone and tablet is forcing companies to reevaluate and re-engineer their online presence to accommodate the huge numbers of users. Quite simply, if your website isn’t mobile-compatible, then you are losing out on a massive number of potential clients and consumers.

In the past, web designers would concept and build websites to work with all the various online browsers, graphics cards and operating systems. The look, functionality and ‘feel’ of a website had to work perfectly, as did the click-paths. A website that frustrated users through navigational shortcomings or compatibility glitches led to users abandoning the site, and a corresponding drop in business. “Mobile technology is now throwing up a similar set of problems and if your site isn’t mobile compatible then you’re losing visitors, new leads and potential business,” explains web marketing expert Jason Stanard, CEO of Florida-based website design and optimization firm GreatCircle Studios.

In essence, a website must now be viewable, navigable and fully interactive with mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that websites now have to cater to the expectations and needs of consumers using mobile devices . If a website isn’t optimized for a smaller screen and is time consuming to load, it will not attract or sustain the number of visitors needed, and business will suffer as a result.

Technology is constantly evolving which means a successful website will, in turn, have to evolve in order to keep up. Never before has it been so important for businesses to have people dedicated to planning and implementing new website methodologies to ensure mobile users are not only targeted and catered to, but also are directed to a fully optimized and engaging website experience.